Wsrtjtyk

I have two interconnected models in my blog app; Category and Post. The blog front page displays a list of posts and their corresponding metadata, like it should; fairly standard stuff.

Aside from displaying the posts on the front page, they're also displayed on the individual user's profile page in short form (just the category and the headline).

What I'm interested in doing is sorting all the posts that belong in a category, however the only way I've managed to make it work is something like this:

NEWS
some title
NEWS
another title
PYTHON
another arbitrary title
NEWS
yet another title

I'd like to sort it thusly instead:

NEWS
some title
another title
yet another title
PYTHON
another arbitrary title

Alas, my mind keeps turning into a bowl of spaghetti when I try to come up with a method, so without further ado; how should I go about this bit?
I reckon that there's something off with calling the category from the post's metadata only to try and categorize the posts via the retrieved data, but aside from that, I'm somewhat lost.

Here's the template snippet from user_profile.html:

{% if user.post_set.exists %}

  <p>

    {% for post in user.post_set.all|dictsortreversed:"date_posted" %}

      <span style="margin-right: 5px; padding: 3px 6px; border-radius:12px; color:#FFF; background-color:#FFA826;">{{ post.category }}</span><br/>

      <a style="margin-left:3px;" href="{% url 'blog:post-detail' post.slug %}">{{ post.title|truncatechars_html:30 }}</a><br/>

    {% endfor %}

  </p>

{% endif %}

The models:

class Category(models.Model):

    class Meta:

        verbose_name = 'category'

        verbose_name_plural = 'categories'



    name = models.CharField(max_length=30)



    def __str__(self):

        return self.name





class Post(models.Model):

    author      = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    title       = models.CharField(max_length=60)

    category    = models.ForeignKey(Category, blank=True, null=True, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    content     = RichTextUploadingField(

                                    external_plugin_resources=[(

                                        'youtube',

                                        '/static/ckeditor/ckeditor/plugins/youtube/',

                                        'plugin.js'

                                        )],

                                        blank=True,

                                        null=True,

                                    )

    date_posted = models.DateTimeField(default=timezone.now)

    updated     = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    slug        = models.SlugField(max_length=70, blank=True, null=True, help_text='<font color="red">don't. touch. the. slug. field. unless. you. mean. it.</font> (it will auto-generate, don't worry.)')



    def __str__(self):

        return self.title



    def get_absolute_url(self):

        return reverse('blog:post-detail', kwargs={'slug': self.slug})

And finally the view which relate to the post_list.html:

class PostListView(ListView):

    model = Post

    template_name = 'blog/home.html'

    context_object_name = 'posts'

    ordering = '-date_posted'

    paginate_by = 6

Should I be doing it in a different manner altogether, I wonder? And if so, what would be considered 'best practice'?

Thank you :)

You can add the ordering in your model:

class Post(models.Model):

   ...

   class Meta:

      ordering = ['category', '-date_posted']

See the documentation for more details:

update

Maybe its better to use custom manager for this:

from django.db import models



class CustomManager(models.Manager):

    # subclass model manager

    def custom_category_dict(self, **kwargs):

        # add a new method for building a dictionary

        nDict = dict()

        for i in self.get_queryset().filter(**kwargs):  # filter queryset based on keyword argument passed to this method

            current_list = nDict.get(i.category.name, )

            current_list.append(i)

            nDict.update({i.category.name: current_list})

        return nDict



class Posts(models.Model):

    # override posts model with manager

    objects = CustomManager()

Usage:

# view



 class PostListView(ListView): 

    ...

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):

        context = super(PostListView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)

        context['category_wise_sorted_posts'] = Posts.objects.custom_category_dict()  # you can pass filter logic as well, like Posts.objects.custom_category_dict(author_id=1)

        return context





# template

{% for category, posts in category_wise_sorted_posts.items %}

<!-- Or {% for category, posts in user.posts_set.custom_category_dict.items %}  -->

     {{ category }}

     {% for p in posts %}

          {{ p.title }}



     {% endfor %}

{% endfor %}